Founded in Paris in 1886 by Paul Passy as a society of language teachers, under a name spelled in its own notation (1886)
Dhi Fonètik Tîtcerz' Asóciécon; renamed in 1897 to the form it still bears
General knowledge · Words & language
The International Phonetic Alphabet
Association founded 1886; first alphabet 1888
Phonetics — one symbol for every sound in every language
A notation designed so that any speech sound in any language can be written down unambiguously, with one symbol for each distinctive sound and one sound for each symbol. It grew out of a group of language teachers who met in Paris in 1886 under Paul Passy, first called the Phonetic Teachers' Association, and who wanted children to learn pronunciation from a script that did not lie to them. The chart is arranged as a grid of consonants by place and manner of articulation, with the vowels plotted on a trapezium representing the mouth.
How to spot them
- ▸Square brackets for the sound, slashes for the phoneme
- ▸A vowel trapezium, and a consonant grid of place against manner
- ▸Founded in Paris in 1886; Daniel Jones made it famous in Britain
- ▸The upside-down e that stands for the vowel at the end of 'sofa'
Key facts
Vowels are plotted on a trapezium, from close front at the top left to open back at the bottom right
A schematic cross-section of the mouth, with the tongue's highest point as the coordinate
Daniel Jones of University College London devised the cardinal vowels and is widely taken to be the model for Shaw's phonetics professor
Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, though Shaw acknowledged Henry Sweet as the chief inspiration
The Kiel Convention of 1989 gave the chart the form it has today (1989)
The last wholesale revision; the Handbook followed in 1999
Its founding principle: one symbol for one distinctive sound, and one sound for one symbol
Which is exactly what ordinary English spelling does not do
The rotated letter e that writes the unstressed vowel in 'about' and 'sofa'
Schwa — the commonest vowel in spoken English
Clicks have a row of their own: the bullseye, the pipe, the exclamation mark and the double pipe (1989)
Standardised at Kiel for the Khoisan and Bantu languages that use them
A labiodental flap, approved in 2005, is the most recent addition (2005)
Used in a number of central African languages
Key ideas
- The alphabet is meant to be used at two levels. A broad, phonemic transcription between slashes records only the contrasts that matter in a given language; a narrow, phonetic transcription between square brackets records how the sound was actually made.
Quick-fire facts
- •The Association was founded in Paris in 1886 by Paul Passy and colleagues in the language-teaching Reform Movement
- •It was first called the Phonetic Teachers' Association, became L'Association Phonétique des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes in 1889, and took its international name in 1897
- •The notation draws on the Romic alphabet of Henry Sweet, itself descended from work by Alexander John Ellis and Isaac Pitman
- •Daniel Jones, professor at University College London, established the system of cardinal vowels
- •The Kiel Convention of 1989 produced the modern chart; the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association appeared in 1999
- •The Illustrations of the IPA are short descriptions of individual languages published in the Association's journal
- •The symbols θ and ð are borrowed from Greek and from Old English respectively
- •The Oxford English Dictionary adopted the notation for its second edition of 1989, replacing James Murray's own scheme
- •The Extensions to the IPA, for disordered speech, were adopted in 1990
- •The symbols are all encoded in Unicode, mostly in the IPA Extensions block
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- International Phonetic Association — History of the IPA
- International Phonetic Association — Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet